Reading Review # 3

     When I last left this assignment, I was getting slightly overwhelmed with the amount of information and ideas for teaching students about digital citizenship and information literacy, as well as torn as to which of these topics I wished to explore further; for example, research skills versus online safety and ethics. I realized that although these are different facets of 21st century learning, they are certainly not mutually exclusive and can of course be taught alongside each other. For example, students need to be able to discern what is "real" as they attempt to research a topic, and that in turn spurs them to think critically about all of their activities on the web, whether it's for a research project for school or making an informed opinion about an issue before posting it on Facebook or Twitter for all to see.

     In that sense, I began to focus my research on teaching students what exactly digital citizenship is, as an introduction to the myriad of activities and exercises I found initially for my second blog post. Just as we teachers have to have a solid "why" for what we do, so too do students need a rationale for why they are learning something.

     For this particular focus, I started looking up different keywords and phrases, such "importance of digital citizenship" or "engaging students in digital citizenship." I love infographics and was looking for something simple that would be a good beginning to a discussion. Perhaps a good interactive assignment would be to get intermediate students to create their own infographic on what they believe is important in regards to digital citizenship and use them to teach the younger students.

    This article has some good suggestions on broaching the topic with the youngest students, such as starting by talking about respect and how the internet is a place to learn.  I loved the infographic, and was able to find it on another site through Pinterest (where I found even more great ideas for actual lessons.)

Photo Credit: 

http://thebookfairygoddess.blogspot.ca/2015/09/digital-citizenship-update.html

I also thought this one would appeal to intermediate students who might already have a device and use social media:

Photo Credit:

http://cohort21.com/blog/2014/02/04/guest-blogger-anthony-chuter-on-digital-citizenship/

      Overall, I found this inquiry to be very helpful, as I knew that I wanted to make teaching digital citizenship my focus for this year in the library but I wasn't quite sure where to start. I also found that many of the most practical resources appeared through more "informal" ways of searching, such as blogs, Twitter, Pinterest and simply networking with other TLs, rather than looking at academic articles through the UBC library.   Now that I have seen the multitude of ways that students can develop these skills, I feel more confident that I will be able to engage students and get them truly thinking about both their online presence and their ability to gather valid information.